I’m assuming you haven’t read the book Spiritus. Because he does deal with both aspects. The book as a whole deals quite a bit with culture’s influence. What it does state is that culture isn’t innante but has quite a bit to do with where we are technologicly. The same goes for mrblue92’s most recent post.
The New Zelanders of old saw naure as something to be altered. They, and also New Guinea highlanders altered their environment quite a bit. When given the proper technology, these people also became quite warlike and tried to expand their respective empires. What kept them from doing so earlier was a lack o rescources. Their was nothing uniquely European about that idea of overcoming nature.
While I don’t expect to read the book within the next couple days (I do have it on order), I expect this debate will be gone by the time I do. So I’ll express my views on this, with that caveat. (Diamond might agree with me for all I know.)
I’ll agree that culture is not innate, but instead mostly learned from other members of the society. I’ll also agree that technology (and geography) have a significant impact on culture. Necessity is often the mother of invention. However, there are other factors that, taken together, are equally (if not more) important.
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Individual Effort. Certain individuals can display genius and change their society and/or culture in very significant ways–I won’t get into specific names. Whether an individual’s accomplishments are due to their specific circumstance (environment) or sheer ability is probably unknowable, but I’d argue a combination is needed.
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Historical and Cultural Feedback. Societies do not just respond to environment; they also respond to groups within (rebels, minorities, religious sects, etc.) and without (trade, alliances, warfare, etc.). While geography and technology comes into play in these interactions, they do not necessarily drive them directly.
There are probably other factors I can’t think of off hand. (I thought I could at least get to #3… Feel free to add more to the list.) The point is that human history is not a simple mathematical formula–people are different enough that interaction is chaotic, not unlike weather patterns. I hesitate to bring specific examples into play, but if Hannibal completely defeats Rome, the Roman Empire never exists, and a Chinese sect gets really ambitious, would we all be Chinese, regardless of geography?
I don’t really think this is a debate anymore. I’ll just ad that I feel he addresses both point’s 1 and 2 quite well. They are both given issue in the book. Since you already have it on order, you can just read the book. the errors in the book I feel, are not enough time spent on the actuall movements histories of North America and Polynesia. And sometimes he does tend to paint in very broad strokes. You can’t really fault him for it though, he was trying to encapsulate all of human history in one book.
Diamond’s book has arrived. But I think I’m going to read Mike Nelson’s Movie Megacheese first. It looks more interesting.
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is by Paul Kennedy. Good book, but a difficult read.
Like many others, I’m a big fan of Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.
This sounds like something of an overgeneralization. Humans are rarely, if ever, in harmony with nature. Like every other organism, we seek to obtain as many resources as possible to ensure our survival and maximize our reproductive output. Is there any evidence to suggest that Africans or Pacific Islanders are immune to these motives? I haven’t read “Pigs for the Ancestors.”
Did he? Dr. Diamond was an ornithologist and evolutionary biologist before his more recent publications in anthropology. He has done decades of field work in New Guinea and other southern Pacific Islands, but I don’t think he grew up there.
I think Spiritus has an excellent point, though. The hypotheses in Diamond’s book fit the data, but do not demonstrate causality. I do think Diamond’s explanation is the best I’ve heard yet, though.
I have read about half of Guns, Germs, and Steel and I must say that so far, I am VERY disappointed. I’ll start with the good things, though. He has one of the most interesting topics one could imagine: why civilizations appeared and advanced at different rates in some areas and not others. His facts are sound as far as I know, and very interesting. I even agree with most of his theses, more or less; I agree that geography (and the corresponding biotic environment) is one of the principle keys to understanding the broad trends of the development of civilization. I agree that differences in innate intelligence, creativity, etc. - the usual racist explanations - are not sound.
BUT…he’s just so damn sloppy. His thinking is hand wavy, tendentious, selective, and far more given to ad hoc rationalizations than I want to see in such an important subject.
Examples from what I’ve read so far:
- Pages 20-22. Diamond asserts that some races are genetically superior to others in intelligence. In proper academic liberal politically correct fashion, however, he concludes that it is whites who are inferior - in this case to New Guineans. He asserts this based on personal impression and then rationalizes it as follows: “[In Europe] murders were relatively uncommon and a state of war was the exception rather than the rule”. Compared to the “New Guineans [who] suffered high mortality from murder, chronic tribal warfare, accidents, and problems procuring food.”
I believe the assertion about New Guineans, but has Europe really been characterized by a paucity of death from murder and warfare relative to other cultures? I know enough European history to feel this needs a LOT more support.
He continues “Intelligent people are likelier than less intelligent ones to escape those causes of high mortality in traditional New Guinea societies.”
This is a fascinating suggestion, that warfare and murder somehow select for MORE intelligent people. Is there any actual sociological evidence to support this startling idea? Not in Diamond’s book, that I have seen. (Obviously, I am necessarily abbreviating his argument. The gist of it is that European mortality has historically been much more due to disease than violence, and that it is violence selects for the more intelligent people). The rather obvious comparison is with China, which has indisputably had an extraordinary degree of political and social stability for most of history, as well as many of the diseases that plagued Europe. Has this made the Chinese less intelligent? Although implicit in his arguments, Diamond is silent on this score (not properly PC, maybe?), but he concludes “Thus, the usual racist assumptions has to be turned on its head. Why is it that Europeans, despite their likely genetic disadvantage … ended up with much more of the cargo?[“cargo” is New Guinea slang for western material technology] Why did New Guineans wind up technologically primitive, despite what I believe to be their superior intelligence?”
I felt a more intelligent argument was necessary to support this form of the question.
2)pg. 43 In discussing competing theories of why large mammals went extinct in Australia, Diamond argues against the idea that it may have coincided with an extreme environmental change: “Personally, I can’t fathom why Australia’s giants should have survived innumerable droughts in their tens of millions of years of Australian history, and then have chosen to drop dead almost simultaneously…precisely and just coincidentally when the first humans arrived.”
I actually agree with his point. I think the extinctions were probably caused mostly by invading humans. But this is another example of specious reasoning. Why should the dinosaurs have suddenly gone extinct, when they survived millions of years of asteroids striking the earth before? The answer is, obviously, this was a BIGGER one, and they couldn’t deal with it. The fact that animals have survived in an environment doesn’t mean that an extreme unusual condition cannot occur in that environment and drive them under. That’s just silly, and certainly not a mistake a biologist should make.
- Pages 110-111. In giving reasons for the rise of food production, he makes the reasonable statement “One factor is the decline in the availability of wild foods.”
Fine, if people are taking less food out of the natural environment they are likely to start planting more. On the very next page, though, we are told “Human population densities were gradually rising throughout the late Pleistocene anyway, thanks to improvements in human technology for collecting and processing wild foods.”
Here the beginnings of agriculture are attributed to increasing population densities that occured because people were getting MORE food out of the natural environment.
It’s not that both or even one of these ideas is necessarily wrong, nor are they truly incompatible since they could in principle occur simultaneously, or have had their effects in different areas. But when you have constructed two opposing hypotheses to explain a single phenomenon, you haven’t explained anything, at least for the general case - because you can always invoke one or the other no matter what empirical evidence you see. There’s no falsifiability.
These are just some of the things that crop up as I flip back through the book, there are more. At any rate, the book is worth reading, but don’t expect strict standards of either history or science. So far, I agree with most of Diamond’s conclusions, but I don’t come away feeling he has done a good job of establishing them in any strict way.
I started reading it last night, and I too was pretty pissed off, right at the same p. 20-22. He dimisses the standard racial arguments as having no conclusive evidence, but then goes right on to make the same mistake. If he had said “both these lines of thought hang on fallacious reasoning” or something to that effect, I would have agreed completely. The way it reads makes him sound like an idiot, not exactly the impression you want to give in the prologue.
He actually made two arguments why the New Guinea natives were more intelligent:
A. Europeans were genetically selected for disease resistance, but New Guineans died more from murder, accidents, warfare, etc. There are two problems here. First is that those selection criteria would be more likely encourage strength, keen eyesight and hearing, endurance, balance, and reflexes. Intelligence seems like it would be as low on the list as it was for Europeans. Secondly, genetic selection is limited to individuals before reaching breeding age, so unless warfare and murder are common among New Guinean children, they are would only affect the number of offspring, and given the rather random nature of warfare, murder, and accidents, any conclusion is suspicious.
B. To paraphrase, children from Western cultures sit in front of the TV all day and are therefore less intelligent due to less mental stimulation. First off, who’s to say TV is better or worse mental stimulation than playing baseball, running through the forest, or the majority of other children’s activity? Second, and more importantly, this has absolutely no bearing on his historical arguments, as the proximate causes of European global dominance were already established by 1500. And I doubt parents passed on their TV brain damage to their children back then.
Realistically, if James Burke is to be believed, it is probable illiterate New Guineans would have better memory than literate Europeans, simply by necessity. (Burke makes a good argument that the invention of the printing press allowed people to have externally stored knowledge and therefore memory capacity diminished significantly. I suppose it might also be argued that deep knowledge of one’s environment at that point may have been lost in favor of wider, more general knowledge.) This may explain Diamond’s observations that New Guineans were more intelligent on average than Westerners. But of course, intelligence doesn’t necessarily have much to do with memory capacity–just because a savant might be able to recite every number in a phone book doesn’t make him more intelligent than the general population.
Yes it probably is too general a statement, and I kind of regret posting that particular part.
As far as harmonizing with nature, I guess it depends on your perspective. What is “natural”? Birds and insects build nests, people build homes–is one natural and the other not? Some ants cultivate fields of fungus underground–are they natural and human farmers not? Beavers and humans cut down trees and build dams. Isn’t a city just a giant, technological termite colony with a different system of government? (Wow, talk about off-topic…)